01.21.08
Not thinking it out, just writing it as it comes…
It should be easier to explain than this.
To touch someone’s hand as you walk together through grass that reaches up past your calves to tickle that spot behind your knees. The smile that’s shared then. Not at all tentative, although you might think that’s what it is you see; boldness, actually, beneath the warm, translucent blue iris sky with its streamers of cloud like the Milky Way.
It should be easier to explain why this matters.
Not merely that, in later hours, alone, holding between both hands a hot mug of Folgers with a splash of milk and three teaspoons of sugar and one of chocolate mix — the mug sitting on your chest, on top of the blanket — you will smile up at the ceiling where the glow of the television brightens and fades across the grain. And that it will be just like the time you placed your hand over your niece’s hand as she petted the big black Lab named Chick, the first dog she’d ever touched, ever petted, in your backyard and she said “Doggy soft!” and nearly squealed with delight in that high little voice of hers, and her hand was soft and warm and animate, and her bright, clear, hazel eyes were wide as the ones you see in all those Japanese cartoons nowadays. And that it will be just like the time you brushed back your mother’s soft, gray-brown hair from her high, smooth brow and she sighed contentedly in her sleep, just before you headed off to bed with the holiday lights twinkling in reds and blues, yellows and greens, behind you, casting a warm glow from the front room and chasing your vague shadow before you toward the dimly inferred door of the room you still think of as yours even now that you’ve not been there for years. If only it was easy to explain this.
Those moments strung together like decorative lights or maybe like a cluster of tea lights on a table or china cabinet or…. Those moments blurring into minutes when there arose this sense of something eternal happening, bleeding through from some other dimension, from some unknown compass point, spilling into the now and uplifting it like an icon of joy. It’s not a matter of returning to innocence or finding love or being remade whole at last. It’s not just some confirmation of life or seal of approval from on high or anything like that. In some ways it’s achingly, stupidly sentimental.
But it’s also not that at all, because it’s like freedom and release. To briefly touch another and know, like a leaping spark of electricity, that you are both alive and there and real. To know that it’s really happening, and that all that came before is something that really happened, and that it will all go on because — look at the starlight! Look. How long did it take for it to get here? And it will be just like that, and like the time you took your first road trip all by yourself and realized that you were this autonomous agent in the world but it only mattered if you devoured as much of it as you could. And now there are all these pictures you have in various yellow and white envelopes, and all the ones in those two big photo books that you took the time to label and occasionally take out to share with someone who will try but never quite get how much the journey meant to who you are today. And it’s all such a jumble because how on earth could you ever say what it is you know it means… you know it means. How could you ever explain?
It should be easier to explain. Explain why you must weep into your pillow when it hits you just how significant it is that you were so fortunate to know that embrace, that kiss, that casual brush of a hand. How you burst! How you break into dust and scatter away like seeds to grow anew in a thousand other ways! And maybe it is that it’s simply not meant to be explained. Maybe there are some things — like rain falling on the window when you’re resting your chin on the chill, damp-feeling sill and watching the leaves just beyond the pane bounce and drip-drop the raindrops from each to each until the water is lost among the roots — that bear only silence as they happen and refuse to be captured when recounted later. Maybe it is that this sweet pain is a reward, a pointer that indicates without numbers or letters or art that you have done all right, and that you should be grateful for it, grateful to it, because it came to you for no reason other than you brought it, sui generis, to you.
